She woke in the pre-dawn and stretched like a contented cat. He smiled at and kissed her. Her hand moved, seemingly by its own accord, to his rising erection.
‘Do you really have to go off on this trip by yourself?’
‘Yes, baby.’
Elise’s attitude towards him softened slowly over the following three days. Perhaps, Tom thought as he stacked the camping fridge-freezer in the back of the Land Rover with frozen steak, boerewors and a six-pack of Castle, it was because Sannie’s mother knew he would soon be out of their lives.
Still, she’d been helpful, taking him to the local supermarket and butcher, and pointing out an auto spares shop where he’d bought extra oil, filters, a fan belt and radiator hoses. He got the gas bottles filled, and made the bed in the rooftop tent with clean linen and a blanket. He sorted his clothes, leaving some behind at Sannie’s, and bought an extra pair of shorts and a khaki bush shirt for the road. It was Friday afternoon and he was ready to go. When Elise returned home after picking up Christo and Ilana from school, Tom started packing her ageing Toyota Condor people-mover for the weekend trip to Kruger.
‘I can help,’ Christo said, standing beside him in his school shirt and shorts, minus shoes.
‘Good man.’ Tom could have packed the wagon more quickly by himself, but he sorted small boxes and cooler bags for the boy to carry and let him pack things where he wanted to in the boot. He would have to learn some day, Tom thought. They chatted about soccer and television shows as they worked, and Tom, to his surprise, found himself laughing at a couple of jokes the boy made and generally enjoying his company.
‘Are you coming back here after your holiday, Tom?’ Christo asked as he hefted his own small backpack full of clothes into the Condor.
‘Yes, I have to bring your dad’s truck back.’
‘No, are you coming to stay with us?’ At that moment Elise appeared from the back door, a picnic basket in one hand. She stopped to listen.
Tom sighed. What to say? He pushed the cold box to the back of the cargo area and wiped his hands on his shorts. He looked down at the boy. ‘Would you like me to come and stay?’
It was Christo’s turn to ponder his answer for a moment. He nodded his head.
‘I forgot something,’ Elise said, and turned back to the kitchen.
Before Tom could speak to Elise, Sannie arrived, honking the horn of her Mercedes as the electric gate rolled open. ‘Hey, man! I thought you guys would be packed already,’ she chided. She kissed Christo and smiled at Tom, then ran inside, pausing only to kick off her high heels. ‘I’ll be changed in ten minutes, and you’d better be ready!’
Sannie had finished work early, at one o’clock, but even so they had to drive hard to get to the park before the entrance gates closed at six. The Land Rover blew blue smoke for the first half-hour, but eventually the long- dormant engine warmed up and Tom found he could coax it up to a hundred and ten. Sannie had suggested that Elise could drive the children in the Condor and that she would ride with Tom, in case he needed directions. ‘The kids have hardly seen you for a week, Sannie,’ Elise reminded her.
Tom thought her mother had made a good call. Besides, he needed to get used to navigating himself around Africa. Sannie soon outstripped him on the motorway, easily sitting on a hundred and twenty. Via her cell phone, she told him that they would go on ahead and start setting up at Pretoriuskop camp. Tom assured her that he could read a map well enough to find her.
It was the same road he and Sannie had driven together from Johannesburg to Tinga Legends, on the recce trip before Greeves’s abduction. It seemed like a lifetime ago and, in a sense, it was. Tom’s old life was over. No job, no future — at least not in England. He considered this. No, he told himself, it wasn’t quite over yet.
When he passed the hijacking hotspot warning signs near Witbank he felt a pang of concern for Sannie and her family. However, Sannie had her Z88 service pistol with her, and she had given Tom her private firearm, a nine-millimetre South African-made RAP 401, a compact semiautomatic. Its short barrel made it easy to conceal, but the eight-round magazine was less than half the capacity of the Glock he would have been carrying if he was still on the job. Tom had hoped that she would offer him a firearm. One of the reasons he wanted to drive to Malawi, rather than fly, was so he could carry a weapon. He hadn’t told Sannie of his ulterior motive.
He broke his first law of the trip when he arrived at the Numbi Gate entrance. He should have declared the pistol, but did not. He had it stashed in the tool-box under a mountain of gear in the back of the Land Rover. Over the next two days he would find a better hiding spot for it for when he had to start crossing borders. Sannie had gone through the motions of asking him why he thought he needed to take a gun with him out of South Africa, but had given up in the face of his silence. She’d given him two spare magazines and a box of bullets as well.
On the short drive to Pretoriuskop camp from the gate he slowed and stopped to watch a white rhino grazing by the side of the road. It ignored him, contentedly munching away on the short green grass that had sprung up in a burnt patch of bush with the first rains of the season. On its back was a tiny bird with a red bill. An oxpecker. The animal’s askari, as Sannie had called it. Tom had no one to guard any more, and the feeling was liberating in a way. He was here for himself and no one else. Ironically, his very next thought was of Sannie and her kids. He checked the time on his watch and made it in through the wooden gates of the rest camp with only minutes to spare before the curfew kicked in.
The rest camp consisted of a camping area and rows of bungalows, ranging from small rondavels, as Sannie called them, to larger, self-contained houses which would sleep a family of six. There were plenty of mature trees and the lawns were green and well kept, with some help, no doubt, from the trio of warthog that darted across the road in front of Tom’s Land Rover, their tails pointing straight up like antennae.
He found Sannie, Elise and the children at the top end of the camping ground, which occupied a series of terraces down one side of the complex. An electric fence, reinforced with thick metal cables to keep elephant at bay, surrounded the encampment.
‘Did you see the rhino?’ Ilana asked him.
He bent over and assured her that he had. The little girl had been warming to him over the past couple of days and he felt bad that he would soon disappear, as had the last man in her life. Sannie finished hammering in a tent peg, and stood and wiped her brow. She had made short work of setting up the nylon dome tent in which she, Elise and the kids would all sleep. She wore camouflage shorts, and a stretchy orange tank top that revealed her flat belly when she stretched and yawned.
With some direction from Sannie and the kids, Tom soon had his fold-out rooftop tent erected for the first time. It looked cosy, and he thought it would be even cosier if during the night Sannie climbed up the ladder to join him.
Tom engaged Elise while Sannie took the kids to shower, asking her to instruct him on the finer points of barbecuing — or braaiing, as the South Africans called it. He’d made a few attempts in his tiny back yard in London and on holidays in Spain, but none that could be classed as overwhelmingly successful, he told her. Elise laughed and talked him through the basics of lighting the fire, waiting for it to die down to glowing coals and then adjusting the circular grid which moved up and down on a metal pole attached to the wok-like fire tray. It seemed simple enough.
He cooked, with gentle encouragement and advice from Sannie and Christo, and the steaks weren’t nearly as burned as they might have been. It had been a long day for all of them, especially Sannie, and they were all in their tents by nine.
Tom lay in his rooftop bed and listened to the noises of the bush — the squeak of bats, the screech of an owl, the comfortingly familiar croak of frogs in the nearby dam. Far off, he heard the low groans of a lion calling to his pride. Sleep came slowly.
Sannie woke him at four, and chivvied him out of bed and into the Condor. At this time of year the camp gates opened at four-thirty. Elise was staying in camp, but Sannie and the kids were determined to go out and try to find the lion who had been calling again in the pre-dawn dark, closer to camp. They found him, no more than a kilometre away, lying on the bitumen road, still calling. He lowered his head and thrust out his snout, as if to squeeze every last little note out of his huge lungs. It felt to Tom like the metal panels on the Toyota’s sides were vibrating.
They drove to Skukuza, where Sannie had introduced him to Isaac Tshabalala. It brought back bad memories for Tom, but galvanised him for the long journey ahead. Sannie bought the kids burgers and ice cream for lunch and they all swam in a pool in a picnic site, located down the road from the camp on the banks of the Sabie River. It was, Tom noted, the same river that Tinga Lodge overlooked. As much as he enjoyed pretending he was part of
